Widespread and frequent horizontal transfers of transposable elements in plants
- Moaine El Baidouri1,
- Marie-Christine Carpentier1,
- Richard Cooke1,
- Dongying Gao2,
- Eric Lasserre1,
- Christel Llauro1,
- Marie Mirouze3,
- Nathalie Picault1,
- Scott A Jackson2 and
- Olivier Panaud1,4
- 1 Université de Perpignan via Domitia;
- 2 University of Georgia;
- 3 Institut de Recherche pour le Développement
- ↵* Corresponding author; email: panaud{at}univ-perp.fr
Abstract
Vertical, transgenerational transmission of genetic material occurs through reproduction of living organisms. In addition to vertical inheritance, horizontal gene transfer between reproductively-isolated species has recently been shown to be an important, if not dominant, mechanism in the evolution of prokaryotic genomes. In contrast, only a few horizontal transfer (HTs) events have been characterized so far in eukaryotes and mainly concern transposable elements (TEs). Whether these are frequent and have a significant impact on genome evolution remains largely unknown. We performed a computational search for highly conserved LTR-retrotransposons among 40 sequenced eukaryotic genomes representing the major plant families. We found that 26 genomes (65%) harbor at least one case of horizontal TE transfer (HTT) . These transfers concern species as distantly related as palm and grapevine, tomato and bean or poplar and peach. In total, we identified 32 cases of HTTs, which could translate into more than two millions among the 13,551 monocot and dicot genera. Moreover, we show that these TEs have remained functional after their transfer, occasionally causing a transpositional burst. This suggests that plants can frequently exchange genetic material through horizontal transfers and that this mechanism may be important in TE-driven genome evolution.
- Received August 1, 2013.
- Accepted January 24, 2014.
- Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
This manuscript is Open Access.
This article, published in Genome Research, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
